Obamas’ and the 1%’s Political Program, After the 2008 Crash has Been to Bailout and Protect Capitalisim the 1% and to Attack the the Standard of Living of the 99%. Must be Opposed Oppose Austerity In the United States and World-Wide! — To Begin, We Should Form a National Coalitions of Workers, Blacks, and Oppressed Minority Coalition to Call For a National March Against War, Poverty and Austerity In Washington DC!
During This Economic Crisis, Capitalism’s Three Point Political Program: Austerity, Scapegoat Blacks, Minorities, and ‘Illegal’ Immigrants for Unemployment, and The Iron Heel.
Democracy?: As the Capitalist Robber Barons Steal from the 99%: Only the 1% Voted For Austerity — The 99% Should Decide On Austerity — Not Just The 1% Who Profit From Austerity! Under Austerity, All of the World Will Eventually Be Pauperized, Humbled, and Desecrated Like Greece and Puerto Rico. Socialism Means True Democracy — The 99% Will Rule! — Not the Few!
No deal has been reached yet. Negotiations continued Sunday as the strike reached its seventh day. Three people familiar with the union’s thinking said the UAW GM council voted on Sept. 15, when it called the strike, that workers would remain out until the council of local leaders voted to end the nationwide work stoppage. But two UAW local leaders who are on that council told the Free Press it is likely that even after that council vote, workers could remain on strike until membership ratification. A third person affirmed that. — GM strike may stretch out awaiting UAW workers’ vote on tentative deal
Union Officials Should never call for an end to a strike, before voting on a contract, and until the striking workers vote to so do. Any action by the officials, to stop a strike and then vote, undermines the democratic decision in freely making their decision. If they vote turn now a contract offer and to keep striking, the union officials’ decision undermines workers’ democracy to make a decision, without coercion. And, if they democratically make a decision makes the union membership look unreasonable to the public) — Roland Sheppard, Retired Business Agent Painter District Council #8, San Francisco
The United States is not a Democracy (A government in which the supreme power is vested in the people and exercised by them directly)! Only the 1%, through their ownership of the Republicrats and who profit from war and the war budget, vote for War and the war budget — A policy, which Gore Vidal called a Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace. — The 99% Should Decide On War — Not Just The 1% Who Profit From War! Under a Democracy, The 99% would have the right to vote on the policy of Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace! The United States takes from the poor and gives to the Rich.
The top marginal tax rate in 1960 was 91%, which applied to income over $200,000 (for single filers) or $400,000 (for married filers) – thresholds that correspond to approximately $1.5 million and $3 million, respectively, in today’s dollars. Approximately 0.00235% of households had income taxed at the top rate.
A taxpayer at the very bottom of the top 1% (in other words, one who is right on the boundary between the 98th and 99th percentiles) had a nominal income of $24,435, or about $190,000 in today’s dollars. (In 2008, this figure was nominally $380,354, or $400,000 in current dollars.)
But, according to an INSIDER poll, a plurality of Americans support a 70% tax rate on income over $10 million.
In fact, support for Ocasio-Cortez’s proposal is higher than support for last year’s Republican tax cuts.
United States Child Killers! — Bomb That Killed 40 Children in Yemen Was Supplied by the US The bomb used by the Saudi-led coalition in a devastating attack on a school bus in Yemen was sold as part of a US State Department-sanctioned arms deal with Saudi Arabia, munitions experts told CNN. Working with local Yemeni journalists and munitions experts, CNN has established that the weapon that left dozens of children dead on August 9 was a 500-pound (227 kilogram) laser-guided MK 82 bomb made by Lockheed Martin, one of the top US defense contractors. By Nima Elbagir, Salma Abdelaziz, Ryan Browne, Barbara Arvanitidis and Laura Smith-Spark
American Iago: On Washington’s Character Assassins by Slander. Libel. Calumny. Defamation. Vituperation. Degradation. Vilification. Smears and trolling and backstabbing. Whatever you call it, reputation destruction is a tried-and-true foreign-policy tactic of Washington. Whether aimed at individuals or nations, the goal is regime change. It is character assassination writ large. When Washington does it, they don’t just take down an individual, they take down whole administrations, entire governments, nationwide ideologies, and entire economies. By Jason Hirthler
‘An Obligation to Make Radical Change’: At Youth Climate Summit, Young Leaders Say Merely Listening to Science Is Not Enough “Stop asking world leaders to just listen to science and demand they act on science.” At the first-ever Youth Climate Action Summit at the U.N. headquarters in New York on Saturday, climate leader Greta Thunberg was joined by more than 600 young activists who were able to appeal directly to the U.N. secretary-general a day after helping to galvanize an estimated total of four million people at the Global Climate Strike—and the campaigners in attendance did not mince words. Thunberg addressed the gathering briefly, noting that she will be speaking to world leaders at the larger U.N. Climate Action Summit on Monday. “Yesterday millions of people across the globe marched and demanded real climate action, especially young people,” Thunberg said. “We showed that we are united and that we young people are unstoppable.” By Julia ConleyStrike for the Environment, Strike for Social Justice, Strike! A very large chasm exists between those in power, including most of the 2020 presidential candidates, and environmentalists and scientists intent on acting now to resolve growing environmental crises. To reiterate what is known, the United Nations, through its IPCC and the IPBES committees, has provided comprehensive evidence that little time remains to avert catastrophic global warming. And the world is already in the midst of the sixth mass extinction. By Rob Urie
Week 139: Trump Wants to Turn the Golden State a Hazy Shade of GrayPlus, NOAA deletes important renewable energy research, and the border fence steamrolls a national monument. By Brian PalmerHas Climate Consciousness Reached a Tipping Point? We don’t want to jinx it, but with the Youth Climate Strike it sort of looks like . . . yes. (Finally.) Nearly 20 years have passed since the journalist Malcolm Gladwell popularized the term tipping point, in his best-selling book of the same name. The phrase denotes the moment that a certain idea, behavior, or practice catches on exponentially and gains widespread currency throughout a culture. Having transcended its roots in sociological theory, the tipping point is now part of our everyday vernacular. We use it in scientific contexts to describe, for instance, the climatological point of no return that we’ll hit if we allow average global temperatures to rise more than 2 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels. But we also use it to describe everything from resistance movements to the disenchantment of hockey fans when their team is on a losing streak. By Jeff Turrentine
How Big Agriculture Is Preventing Farmers From Combating the Climate Crisis For years, the government has subsidized industrial monoculture rather than sustainability. Smarter policies could help save small farms — and the planet Whatever is done about it, if it’s going to happen on a consequential scale, is going to require the help of the federal government. Earlier this month, Lehman led a coalition to Washington, D.C., for the National Farmers Union Fall Legislative Fly-In, an annual opportunity for farmers to take their concerns directly to lawmakers. Climate change was on the agenda. “There should be incentives for farmers to help address the climate issue, which they can do in ways no other industry can,” he says. They can address it, primarily, through the soil. Crops can absorb a lot of carbon dioxide if the right farming methods are used, like planting “cover crops” to replenish soil during the offseason, diversifying how land is used, employing “no-till” farming that does not disturb the soil and keeps the carbon sequestered, and cutting back on pesticides. But modern agricultural practices have stripped the world’s soil of nutrients to an alarming degree over the course of the past century, releasing carbon back into the atmosphere.
Russian Nuclear Explosion: What Happened to the Five Nuclear Engineers?News media around the world has exhaustively discussed the fact that some sort of nuclear explosion occurred in northern Russia that killed at least seven people and contaminated nearby towns and beaches. Many of Fairewinds Energy Education readers, friends, and colleagues have been contacting Fairewinds via email and social media asking us what really happened in Russia. Let’s talk about the military explosion in Russia. As we say here at Fairewinds, “Radiation Knows No Borders”. Radioactive remnants from the Nyonoksa military testing site explosion, which happens to be close to the populous Russian city of Severodvinsk, have been identified in several nearby countries. To be honest, the world may never know the full impact of the explosion that killed five nuclear engineers and at least two Russian military personnel, but there is enough information for Fairewinds and its colleagues to develop a working hypothesis about what may have occurred. First, what we do know is that this was a Russian military weapon that appears to have been powered by a nuclear reactor – and that reactor would weigh a fair amount. For the Russians to derive the most power possible out of a small atomic reactor, it is likely that the reactor used highly enriched uranium. To reduce weight, according to Dr. Marco Kaltofen of WPI, the reactor, likely had no radiation shielding, and it was designed to turn itself on after it was launched by the team using a normal chemically powered rocket. The Russian government claims that this missile/torpedo did not have an atomic reactor, but rather an “isotopic power source.” However, radiation detected in Norway clearly shows a nuclear reactor was the power source due to the release of radioactive iodine and other radioactive isotopes. By Arne Gundersen
Civil Rights/Black Liberation:
The Pentagon Adds Its Madness to “Fake News” Hysteria The evil geniuses at DARPA claim to be building a defense against fake news – a sure sign that the Pentagon is actually creating fake news. By Glen Ford, Black Agenda Report Executive Editor Audio
Trump Sanctions Will Doom Dollar Supremacy President Trump’s massive use of sanctions as a weapon of US policy “has put the world’s financial, monetary and trading system into crisis,” said Duboisian scholar Dr. Anthony Monteiro. If the US persists in monetarily bludgeoning its adversaries, the nations of the world will “create a basket of currencies” and invent ways of trading “without using the dollar,” said Monteiro.
US Follows Anti-Black Model in Immigration The US has criminalized immigrants, just as it has used the criminal justice system to control and oppress African Americans, said Ben Ndugga Kabuye, of the Black Alliance for Just Immigration. The crime bills of 1994 and 1996 “criminalized immigration at a level that has never been seen before,” making a host of offenses grounds for deportation,” said Kabuye.
Black Women With Guns From Harriet Tubman to female members of the Black Panther Party, Black women have always played a role in armed resistance in the United States, said Jasmine Young, a doctoral fellow at the University of California’s Department of African American Studies. Young is working on a manuscript titled, “Black Women with Guns: Armed Resistance in the Black Freedom Struggle.”
Black Agenda Radio on the Progressive Radio Network is hosted by Glen Ford and Nellie Bailey. A new edition of the program airs every Monday at 11:am ET on PRN. Length: one hour.
Labor:
The Capitalist Ruling Class is So Small, That That They Can Unite Through a Conference Call: Wall Street To General Motors: End Strike And Ram Through Cuts Shut down the strike by GM workers quickly and force through massive concessions. This was the meaning of a statement this week by credit rating agency Moody’s, which called the strike a “credit-negative” for the company, increasing the likelihood that Moody’s might downgrade GM’s credit. If the strike is not wrapped up within one to two weeks, Moody’s warned, “the financial burden of a strike will become more material and the prospects of a contract that avoids erosion of the company’s current competitive position is less likely.”In plain language, it means that if GM and the United Auto Workers cannot shut down the strike quickly and force through major concessions, Wall Street will punish the auto giant by making it more expensive for the company to borrow money and by tanking its stock value. This demonstrates that striking GM workers are not simply confronting GM CEO Mary Barra and other executives, but the entire capitalist class. Behind GM stands its Wall Street investors, who are demanding that the company do everything to ensure a high rate of profit in the face of what is expected to be a protracted downturn in the auto industry. By Tom Hall
President Trump, I’m One of the Workers You Lied To My entire working life has been dictated by offshoring. I’ve spent my career jumping from one factory closing to another. When President Trump was elected, he said: “Companies are not going to leave the United States anymore without consequences.” His promises ring hollow to me after I got my latest layoff notice. By Tracey Aikman
Economy:
JMorgan Chase Has Billions in CRE Loans Riding on WeWork Surviving WeWork’s business model isn’t workable. Everybody understands that except the Wall Street bank that has the most to lose if WeWork’s initial public offering (IPO) of its stock doesn’t move forward. That bank is JPMorgan Chase, one of the two main underwriters of the IPO, along with Goldman Sachs. WeWork’s business model is to take long-term leases in commercial office buildings and then sub-lease that space under short leases to small businesses, start-ups and freelancers – none of which are particularly known for their ability to pay rent in a downturn. WeWork is currently on the hook for more than $47 billion in long term leases while it has yet to figure out how to make a dime of profits. By Pam Martens and Russ Martens
World:
Saudi Arabia Won’t Attack Iran. But It May Pay Someone Else To The US is being fooled that it needs to rescue its ally in the Middle East. The Saudis always get others to fight for them
here is a longstanding joke told in the Middle East about Saudi Arabia’s reluctance to fight its own wars. “Saudi Arabia will fight until the last Pakistani,” the punchline goes, in reference to the fact that Pakistani troops have long supported Saudi’s military endeavours. The punchline has expanded lately to include the Sudanese, a recent addition to the Saudi army’s ground troops. Saudi Arabia is accustomed to buying labour that it deems too menial for its citizens, and it extends that philosophy to its army. By Nesrine MalikTunisia: presidential election, a blow to the parties of the “democratic transition” The first round of the Tunisian presidential elections on 15 September, described as an “electoral insurrection,” was a heavy blow against all the parties that have in one way or another ruled the country since the revolutionary overthrow of Ben Ali in 2011. Nearly nine years later, none of the social and economic problems that sparked the revolution have been addressed. This was expressed through increased abstention (turnout was only 45 percent, 18 points lower than in 2014) and two “outsiders” going on to the second round, despite one of them being jailed for tax evasion during the campaign. The results were a damning indictment of both the “secular” and “Islamist” bourgeois parties, which have jointly managed the country since 2011. By Jorge Martin
The Election Was Called After The Death Of The 92-Year-Old President Béji Caïd Essebsi / Image: Department Of State
Health, Education, and Welfare:
The government of the United States can pass laws in a few days to spend tens of trillions of dollars for war and the bailout of Wall Street and the bankers. Yet, those who ‘govern’, pass universal healthcare for themselves, but they cannot spend even one trillion dollars for universal health for those who are ‘governed’! This is what is considered, by the powers the to be, a democracy and part of the democratic way. — Roland Sheppard, Let The People Vote on Healthcare!
Health Care Usurey: Why Americans Are Drowning in Medical Debt After his recent herniated-disk surgery, Peter Drier was ready for the $56,000 hospital charge, the $4,300 anesthesiologist bill, and the $133,000 fee for orthopedist. All were either in-network under his insurance or had been previously negotiated. But as Elisabeth Rosenthal recently explained in her great New York Times piece, he wasn’t quite prepared for a $117,000 bill from an “assistant surgeon”—an out-of-network doctor that the hospital tacked on at the last minute. It’s practices like these that contribute to Americans’ widespread medical-debt woes. Roughly 40 percent of Americans owe collectors money for times they were sick. U.S. adults are likelier than those in other developed countries to struggle to pay their medical bills or to forgo care because of cost. California patients paid more than $291,000 for the procedure, while those in Arkansas paid just $5,400. Earlier this year, the financial-advice company NerdWallet found that medical bankruptcy is the number-one cause of personal bankruptcy in the U.S. With a new report out today, the company dug into how, exactly, medical treatment leaves so many Americans broke. Americans pay three times more for medical debt than they do for bank and credit-card debt combined, the report found. Nearly a fifth of us will hear from medical-debt collectors this year, and they’ll gather $21 billion from us, collectively. By Olga Khazan
Sanders Unveils Plan to Wipe Out All Medical Debt in US, Declaring, ‘The Very Concept Should Not Exist’ In the wealthiest country in the history of the world, one illness or disease should not ruin a family’s financial life and future. Pledging to end the “immoral and unconscionable” practice of collecting debt from families who have endured an illness or hospital stay, Sen. Bernie Sanders on Saturday unveiled his plan to wipe out all medical debt in the United States. The Vermont Independent senator and 2020 Democratic presidential candidate announced his proposal to eliminate the $81 billion in medical debt carried by American households days after asking his supporters on social media about the money they owe debt collectors due to medical emergencies or illnesses they experienced in the past. The Sanders campaign heard back from more than 50,000 people who shared stories of the debts that have proven impossible to pay off, sending their credit scores plummeting and affecting families’ daily lives. By Julia Conley
Quotes of the Day:
Strike for the Environment, Strike for Social Justice, Strike! A very large chasm exists between those in power, including most of the 2020 presidential candidates, and environmentalists and scientists intent on acting now to resolve growing environmental crises. To reiterate what is known, the United Nations, through its IPCC and the IPBES committees, has provided comprehensive evidence that little time remains to avert catastrophic global warming. And the world is already in the midst of the sixth mass extinction. By Rob Urie
Has Climate Consciousness Reached a Tipping Point? We don’t want to jinx it, but with the Youth Climate Strike it sort of looks like . . . yes. (Finally.) Nearly 20 years have passed since the journalist Malcolm Gladwell popularized the term tipping point, in his best-selling book of the same name. The phrase denotes the moment that a certain idea, behavior, or practice catches on exponentially and gains widespread currency throughout a culture. Having transcended its roots in sociological theory, the tipping point is now part of our everyday vernacular. We use it in scientific contexts to describe, for instance, the climatological point of no return that we’ll hit if we allow average global temperatures to rise more than 2 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels. But we also use it to describe everything from resistance movements to the disenchantment of hockey fans when their team is on a losing streak. By Jeff Turrentine
Tunisia: presidential election, a blow to the parties of the “democratic transition” The first round of the Tunisian presidential elections on 15 September, described as an “electoral insurrection,” was a heavy blow against all the parties that have in one way or another ruled the country since the revolutionary overthrow of Ben Ali in 2011. Nearly nine years later, none of the social and economic problems that sparked the revolution have been addressed. This was expressed through increased abstention (turnout was only 45 percent, 18 points lower than in 2014) and two “outsiders” going on to the second round, despite one of them being jailed for tax evasion during the campaign. The results were a damning indictment of both the “secular” and “Islamist” bourgeois parties, which have jointly managed the country since 2011. By Jorge Martin
